‘The sparkling cold’ … a scene from I Was a Dark Star Always.
Photograph: Philip Hoare / John Hansard Gallery

I spent my childhood holidays in Torquay, but I’d forgotten how blue its waters were. Meadfoot beach arcs around the bay, looking out to a single, sharp rock in the distance, angular, as if driven from the sky into the sea. In the years before the first world war, the teenage Wilfred Owen spent his own summers on this beach. He’d always loved the water. His father taught him to swim; Tom Owen was a railway clerk in Shrewsbury, but on his days off he’d dress up as a captain and wander Liverpool’s docks. Once he brought home four Lascars; Wilfred and his brother Harold remembered their bare brown feet beneath the tea table.

Wilfred knew where his future lay. His heroes had been drawn to this turquoise sea: Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde. In the summer of 1911, he made the pilgrimage to nearby Teignmouth, where John Keats had stayed in 1818. “In love with a dead ’un”, he wrote a sonnet to the Romantic poet – “Watery memorials of His mystic doom / Whose Name was writ in Water (saith his tomb) ... / Eternally may sad waves wail his death” – and followed it with his first long poem, a rewriting of “The Little Mermaid”, with Keatsian images of “blunt-snouted whales” and the sense that he had put himself in the place of the mermaid who sacrificed her voice to become a human for her prince.

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The sea embodied Owen’s ambitions, both literary and sensual. It would bear him up and carry him away. He was a boy of the fin de siècle: he read Wilde and Yeats, loved his favourite green suit and grew his hair floppy and long. In the summer of 1914, his youthful prospects took a decadent turn. Having failed to get into college, he found himself in southern France, acting as a tutor to an artistic family. He met his first real live poet: Laurent Tailhade, an opium addict and anarchist who’d declared a terrorist bomb in Paris to be a beautiful gesture. Tailhade “slobbered over” Owen, who accepted the compliment. As his biographer Dominic Hibberd notes, this strange meeting would invest his work with its power; like Tailhade, he would find art in disaster. As he wrote of swimming in mountain pools in jagged pararhymes, he believed he was doing in poetry what modernist composers were doing in music.

Boys Breaking the surface of the ebony pond.Flashes Of swimmers carving through the sparkling coldFleshes Gleaming with wetness to the morning gold.

War came like a stain. He would not fight for king and country, but for poetry. He enlisted in the Artists Rifles; it was another aesthetic transformation. Body tightened by training, hair cropped, he saw himself as a shape-shifter – a bird, a wolf, a faun – in an industrial conflict. “If I fall, I shall fall mightily. I shall be with Perseus and Icarus, whom I loved; and not with Fritz, whom I do not hate. To battle with the Super-Zeppelin, when he comes, this would be chivalry more than Arthur dreamed of.”

The reality, when he met it, was shocking. At the western front he found a terrifying beach where fetid water swilled in craters so deep that his men stole lifejackets from cross-Channel ferries to save themselves from drowning. Tanks – called land ships – surfed the mud; gas-masked soldiers peered out of trenches through subaquatic periscopes. It was a new, unnatural history, fearfully evoked in “Dulce et Decorum Est”.

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowningHe plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

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He remembered The Tempest; all the devils were here, in this never-ending storm. The night before an attack, he supervised his men by ritualistic candlelight as they rubbed whale oil into their feet. 175,000 whales died to furnish that stuff, and to supply glycerine for bombs. It was the first war of the anthropocene. Owen’s mentor, Siegfried Sassoon, was stunned when he was told that the war was being fought “for Mesopotamian oil”.

Playing his part, Owen carried poetry into battle: the strange, futuristic work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the perfervid verse of Swinburne, each with their own mortal relationships to the sea.

Thrown in the air by an explosion, he fell to earth, transformed anew. Shellshocked, he was sent to Netley hospital, a vast Victorian establishment overlooking Southampton Water. “I cannot quite believe myself back in England in this unknown region,” he protested. He imagined that he had swum there.

¶

That same shore is where I grew up. It’s where I swim, too. Owen’s was the first poetry I ever appreciated. It was the early 1970s. I was obsessed with David Bowie – another shape-shifter – and Wilde. I felt a kinship with Owen: a young man like me, coming to terms with what the world regarded as natural, or unnatural. I realise now that my English teacher, a harried-looking man who seemed pained by the “real” world, was tapping into a greater awareness of Owen’s work. Owen had once been regarded as a minor figure, but it took the cold war and Vietnam to turn him into the James Dean of protest poetry. The famous, half-turned photograph, which in the original print glows with his tan and subtle smile, was polarised into a dark, gothic image.

Once regarded as a minor figure, it took the cold war and Vietnam to turn him into the James Dean of protest poetry

Benjamin Britten, a pacifist and conscientious objector, pre-empted the revival by adapting Owen’s poems in his 1962 War Requiem (staged this month by the ENO ). Britten’s opera – and later, Derek Jarman’s 1989 Aids-era film version – drew on the homoeroticism in Owen’s work. But the true nature of his sexuality remains as fluid as the sea in which he swam. After Owen’s death, his brother Harold inked out or tore entire pages from the poet’s letters and destroyed his only diary. Written in 1918, it would have given us vital insights into Owen’s last year, when he not only wrote some of the most powerful poems of 20th century literature, but also became part of what we would see as a gay literary circle.

Owen’s poetry can’t be redacted. Its emotion is as bare as an exposed nerve. As a teenager, I felt the physical tug of “Disabled” and the soldier who’s told he’d look a god in a kilt. I sensed Owen’s subversive desires. Forty-five years later, they would resurface in my recent book, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, in which the poet is a central character, as he is in I Was a Dark Star Always, a short film I have made with Adam Low, with Owen’s words read by Ben Whishaw. Our film tries to see Owen not as a doomed hero but as an ambitious young man with a brilliant future; to set him free from the perversity of war.

Jon Stallworthy published his groundbreaking biography of Owen in 1974, while Harold was still alive. Later, in his controversial biography of 2002, Hibberd declared unequivocally that Owen was gay. In poems written as Owen roamed the backstreets of London and Edinburgh – Wildean visions of “godlike youths” with “blood-red lips” – Hibberd detected images of male prostitutes; and lines such as “I needed, you ceded”, he traced the poet’s intense, possibly physical relationship with Charles Scott Moncrieff, later famed for his translation of Proust.

This other life can be seen the lines of what remains. Owen wrote of opium dens in London’s West End, and, through Siegfried Sassoon, met Robbie Ross, Wilde’s first male lover and literary executor. Ross’s gesture to the war effort was to paint his Piccadilly apartment gold in protest. Owen rented a room above Ross’s, and attended Robert Graves’s wedding at St James’s, Piccadilly with Ross, all but on the older man’s arm. Owen’s friends included gay figures such as Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, and Osbert Sitwell. None of this seems unintended.

The last thing he did when he left England in August 1918 was to swim off Folkestone beach. Throughout his military career he had managed to satisfy his passion for swimming – from Yorkshire rivers to Scottish municipal pools - telling his beloved mother, Susan, that “it never fails to give me a Greek feeling of energy and elemental life”. If there was any doubt that Owen equated swimming with a potent sensuality, it is dispelled by this deliberate, final act.

“My last hours in England were brightened by a bathe in the fair green Channel, in company of the best piece of Nation left in England – a Harrow boy”, he told Susan. To Sassoon, he was more revealing: “Moreover there issued from the sea distraction, in the shape, Shape I say, but lay no stress on that, of a Harrow boy, of superb intellect & refinement; intellect because he hates war more than Germans; refinement because of the way he spoke of my Going, and of the Sun, and of the Sea there; and the way he spoke of Everything. In fact, the way he spoke –”

Two months later, Owen led his men into action in northern France. It was the last battle of the war; peace was imminent. At Ors, where only months before they had swum naked in the Sambre-Oise canal, retreating German soldiers flooded the land. At 5.45 on the morning of 4 November, Owen and his company tried to cross a canal in the face of ferocious enemy fire. They breasted the surf of bullets, as he had written in “Spring Offensive”, his last poem, with its final line, “Why speak they not of comrades that went under?”

Owen was seen encouraging his boys as they assembled rafts on the side of the canal. There are conflicting reports about what happened next. One claims he was still on the bank when he was shot; the other that he was on a raft. I see him falling, like Icarus, into the dark water.

¶

In the village cemetery nearby, his name is cut into Portland stone, rather than written on water. The church bells are tolling. On 11 November, as her parish rang in the Armistice, Susan Owen received the telegram. Her son had died far from home. But in this peaceful place, with its lush fields and its gently flowing canal, I feel strangely happy for him. As if, at any moment, a short, sturdy young man with dark grey eyes might pad across to that same bank and, leaving his clothes in a pile on the grass, lower himself in, too.